WildStar

WildStar Overview

WildStar is a SciFi World exploration game that brings in a mixed feel from games such as Borderlands and with artstyle similar to the Ratchet and Clank series.

Features

Dynamic Combat: Enemies offer hints to their major attacks and players are rewarded with buffs and experience for taking the appropriate measures in dodging/countering these attacks.

Path System: Within each playable class is 4 paths players can choose. These not only impact the abilities you acquire but also the missions you can embark on and the bonuses you can attain. For instance the explorer can go on side quests to reach hard to reach places while the soldier can initiate objects that lead to public quests.

Multiple Races: Although they have only revealed the Grenak, Human, and Aurin, each seems unique and useful. Grenak seem to be tough skinned and masters of weaponry and combat. Humans seem to be able to use portal technology to move quickly and close distance to enemies fast. Aurin are psychic and animalistic and summon weapons or ethereal armors to aid their allies and destroy their enemies.

Dynamic Quest Acquisition: You can receive updates to quests on the go from nearby NPCs, saving you from having to travel back and forth to town pointlessly and keeping you straight in the action.

Story Driven: As an Exile, you are on the run from the Dominion race. The Dominion are set to wipe out your races in their conquest of the galaxies. You will travel from one world to the next in your pursuit of freedom and encounter various challenges on each to keep the game fresh.

More Features (from the official site)

PATHS

KICK ASS AND TAKE NAMES!

Planet Nexus ain’t for the faint of heart, so strap on your boots, charge your lasers, and sharpen your swords! Choose from one of many unique classes, using skill-based abilities and combat mechanics to defeat a stunning array of the most dangerous creatures and enemies in the galaxy. Looking for an even bigger challenge? Then jump into PvP battlegrounds, dungeons and epic raids, putting your combat skills to the ultimate test!

EXPLORE A NEW HOMEWORLD!

Nexus is one of the most mysterious and dangerous planets in the entire universe, and you just decided to make it your new home. On the plus side, there are ancient ruins, mystical forests and unexplored moons just waiting to be conquered! On the down side, most of those places are inhabited by cybernetically-enhanced monstrosities, frightening beasts and hostile alien races! The fun never ends!

FEAST YOUR EYES ON THIS!

Dive into the most visually stunning game in the history of the universe! With a completely unique and timeless art style, WildStar is infused with an unforgettable personality that is all its own. Chock full of super cool characters, awe-inspiring environments, and hair-raising boss monsters, WildStar smacks you with eyepopping visual variety at every turn. Now all you have to do is avoid becoming the galaxy’s best-looking corpse!

KICK ADVENTURE IN THE FACE!

Quests? We don’t just have quests…we’ve got deep, multi-layered content, guaranteeing that your adventure on Nexus is bursting at the seams with fun and surprises. Battles with giant killer robots? Check. Timed challenges to kill deadly alien organisms? Check. Discovering powerful ancient technology that will melt your frickin’ face? Double check. And the best part? The greater the risk, the greater the loot!

PLEDGE YOUR ALLIANCE!

On the wild and dangerous frontiers of Nexus, you better pick a side if you want to survive! Want to crush your enemies in a bloodbath of imperial conquest? Then swear to the Dominion, a powerful interstellar empire who has claimed Nexus for its own! Or maybe you’re a born rebel who ain’t takin’ orders from anyone? Then the Exiles – a rogue alliance of mercenaries, refugees and renegades – is the faction for you!

CHOOSE YOUR PATH!

Remember! This is your adventure, so pick a Path and play the way you wanna play! Along with your class, you can choose to be a Soldier, Scientist, Settler or Explorer – each with its own unique content and special rewards designed to fit your particular playstyle. So whether you’re planting a flag, building a starport, climbing a mountain, or studying weird extra-terrestrial critters, your Path creates a unique experience that is all your own!

STAKE YER CLAIM!

Grab your plot, plant a flag, and crack open a beer. This place is yours, you found it, you built it, and you’ll be damned if anyone is gonna take it from you!

WHAT THE …?!

Hold on a second. Nexus was supposed to be the lost planet of the Eldan…but they ain’t here, and it’s now up to you to figure out what happened to them. Lucky for you, they left behind lots of clues. Unlucky for you, most of the clues will demolish, dissect, or vaporize you. So go on, gear-up, and start searching – the truth is out there, if you figure out a way to survive!

Adventures

Riot in the Void – Dominion – Level 15

Veiled by a cloaking field and bristling with high-tech defenses, the Astrovoid is a prison from which no one has ever escaped. But three of the prison’s most dangerous convicts didn’t get the memo, and have now engineered a full-scale prison break. You and your team have been called in to “restore the peace”.

Experience the glory and the glamor of life imprisonment as you infiltrate the most impregnable facility in the history of rehabilitation. The stakes are high, the cellblocks concrete, the choices yours. Sentence: fun!

The Hycrest Insurrection – Exiles – Level 15

The farmers of Hycrest have had enough and now your team of social saboteurs has been sent to support their uprising and teach those high-falutin’ Dominion city slickers the meaning of blood harvest! Will you align with a wily Black Hood agent, an embittered rancher out to avenge his wife, or the farmer’s daughter with a complexion like fresh cream who wants you to do something or other? However you slice it, it’s gonna be an agri-pocalypse!

War of the Wilds – Both Factions – Level 25

Backstory, schmackstory – all YOU need to kill an afternoon is living targets, and the only plot you’re interested in is the funeral kind! Battle for territorial dominance of an arctic, storm-blasted frontier as your team and Skeech legions go toe-to-toe against the five toughest champions in the universe! Not only will they also be seizing control points, farming bosses, and talking trash, they’ll be making you pay for every brutal inch with quarts of blood, so be sure to bring extra!

The Siege of Tempest Refuge – Both Factions – Level 30

Were you born to rock supreme at tower defense? If so, you’ll find this Adventure a thrill a minaret! All you need to do is boldly defend the fortress of Tempest Refuge from wave after wave of increasingly tough invaders using every rocket trooper, rifleman, warbot, and saboteur at your disposal. Will it be a piece of cake or a heaping slice of humble pie à la explode?

Crimelords of Whitevale – Both Factions – Level 40

You and your fellow Blood Scions return to find your biker lair ablaze and buddies perforated. Looks like one of the rival gangs from Thermock Hold needs to be taught a lesson. So now it’s time to rebuild, reload, and do a little legwork. And if your witnesses still aren’t cooperative, then get to work on their other limbs.

The Malgrave Trail – Both Factions – Level 45

In this cross-continental slaughterfest, lead a caravan of sci-fioneers and pack animals across a sun-scorched desert to reach safe haven, all while contending with sandstorms, insect swarms, disease, and aggressive bands of Dreg that see you not only as trespassers but appetizers! Will your intrepid expedition blaze a trail of glory or die horribly? You be the judge!

WildStar Screenshots

WildStar Featured Video

Wildstar – First Look

Full Review

WildStar Beta 2 Preview

Wednesday morning was an exciting day. Not only did I finally receive beta access to WildStar, but I gained permission to cover the first fifteen levels for a write-up. I figured I could easily play the first 15 on both factions and have a write-up ready by Friday morning with two all-nighters. But there was something I didn’t expect. WildStar revived my inner child with its wonder, focus on exploration and discovery, and overall graphical appeal. Yet it kept my jaded veteran gamer side entertained with its fresh combat that meshes the realms of TERA’s action, Guild Wars’ skillbar building, and Dragon Nest’s pacing. Good decisions are rewarded while bad decisions are horribly punished, ensuring you never fully lull into the ‘grind’ mentality, unless you’re willing to shell out some currency to recover from your mistakes.

But back to the coverage. Well for one, I only slept four hours the past two nights, ensuring all spare time not dedicated to work and my fiancé’s demand for Chinese New Years’ celebration was spent in the game. And despite this I managed to only see up to around the level 13 content for the Exiled faction. Why you might ask? WildStar is an ADD gamer’s ultimate playground. Everywhere you look there’s a subtle joke being told, an unusual monster/npc interaction occurring, a nook that seems oddly designed for climbing, and even a wave to catch! While the questing is streamlined to be as simple to follow as it gets short of a full out auto-path system, I spent hours ignoring it just to see what wild discoveries awaited me in the world of Nexus.

They’ve essential brought the magic from the past age of platformers like Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo Kazooie and introduced it into an MMORPG landscape complete with all the mission related goals, sidequests, collecting, jumping, dodging, baddy smashing, and achievement hunting one would expect from the golden era of platforming games. Only now you can experience it in a glorious multiplayer setting.

The Purpose of Paths

If you can’t tell by now, I went with the Explorer path. I.E. out of the options of Settler, Warrior, Scientist, and Explorer, the concept of mapping every inch of every territory while performing death defying leaps appeals to me like nothing else can in an MMORPG. But that’s what makes WildStar so special.

These devs are OCD about the details and want more in their world than the standard gamer’s mind can possibly grasp in one playthrough. Beyond that, there’s certain activities some gamers never want to be a part of, often describing it as a chore more so than an engaging experience. My fiancé for instance never wants to touch a jump quest again after the hell Maplestory forced her through. Meanwhile I get bored to tears watching her catch butterflies mindlessly in Skyrim when she could be delving into dangerous caverns instead.

And that’s exactly why the Paths are here! She catches butterflies, I climb mountains, and we both have a good time. We then meet back up and show off our unique path related skills, such as my ability to dive off huge cliffs and suffer no damage. And occasionally she even opens up areas I couldn’t otherwise explore, making the full experience even more joyous.

Character Customization

This has come a long way since my initial tests of the game for sure. And given its graphical appeal, WildStar is interested in getting some girl gamers onboard. Yet the character customization still clearly has some ground to cover. The facial sliders are pretty impressive and offer a decent amount of options, and no race felt like it was ignored or given special treatment above the others. But beyond that it’s pretty standard fare of choose from around eight hair styles, with a wide variety of colors (not surprisingly, the colors are plentiful and random. Actually this game’s entire slogan could be “Random Plentifulness…ness.”). Another note was that various jobs were race locked, though thankfully none were sex locked. And while at first it was frustrating that I couldn’t make a lucky rabbit medic, I can see the value of this system helping to quickly identify an opponent’s strengths in weaknesses at a glance in PvP.

Oh sure, the pregnant lady gets a body slider, but I don’t.

To my surprise, though this might just say I’ve been in one too many Asian MMORPGs lately, but there wasn’t even a breast or butt slider. Thankfully the devs appreciate the default one ghetto booty fits all approach, otherwise this might have been a serious complaint. All in all just a few more options across the board and a couple body sliders would go a long way for a lot of people. Hopefully the vocal minority don’t push it further in the wrong direction by full launch.

Dat Ass

Combat and Leveling

Given the nature of an MMORPG, combat is almost undoubtedly going to suck when analyzing only the early levels. WildStar seems to get this by making their tutorial painlessly short while making skill acquisition unusually rapid. But with their advanced action heavy combat system (and don’t think it’s easy peasy just because of the telegraphs), it’s clear newer players to the genre could quickly be overwhelmed. As such they keep your hot key slots locked up tight, opening one at a time as you level through the early stages while teasing you with more skills than you can even equip to give veteran gamers plenty of variety to toy around with while their newer compatriots are still getting their feet wet.

Around the time you unlock your sixth skill bar, combat begins to get serious. With an array of damage skills, channels, CC, jumps, and heals (give or take depending on your focus and class), most games would feel easier at this point. You know the old carrot on a stick in front of a super saiyan approach that most games give a player to let them feel invincible for a while so they can mindlessly power level to the non-existent end-game. WildStar prefers to slap a tuna in your mouth and send you crying home to mommy if you take on your enemies mindlessly.

While you’ll rarely have trouble if you play smart and fight one foe at a time (which can easily be done with the extended respawn times), that urge to sneak past your foes will eventually get to you. Maybe you’re bored of fighting the same monster? Maybe you’re pretending to roleplay a spy? Or maybe you’re just that clueless of the massive blue man-eating gorilla coming up behind you? But sooner or later you’ll find yourself caught in an oversized bear trap with a heaping helping of power attacks and CC slamming down on you faster than you can realize your false sense of confidence was your undoing. Keep those jerky sandwiches and stim packs on an easy to reach hotkey cupcake, because you’re going to need them.

In the end it’s all worth it as an announcer straight out of a Monster Truck Rally explodes with mocking congratulations as a list of fantastic new options lets you know your time spent leveling was worth it.

Community

Granted beta communities are always awesome. But Carbine Studios current community is some sort of freaky Twilight Zone level of awesome. I must have spent an hour just watching and learning all the little hidden stat passives, AMP explanations and recommendations, quest completion tips, class differences, and even lore explanations. Never in a hurried or holier than though manner. Always sincere.

The only toxic experience I had was spending too much time in radioactive waste.

Guild recruiting is alive and well and it wasn’t uncommon to see a player rescue a foolish ally that had bitten off more than they could chew. While I never did much partying as it’s not that needed this early on, I had plenty of exploration missions where other players would race me to the top or to the end of caves in a silent competition of twitch skills. Crossing my fingers it doesn’t change much as I could literally make myself at home in my virtual WildStar home.

Critique

As it stands the only area the game felt lacking in for the early stages was optimization. Occasionally I would get hit with random FPS drops which wouldn’t normally be a big issue in other MMORPGs, but can mean missing a critical leap as a WildStar explorer. At this point in the beta all seems as it should be though. Well except for maybe the color overload combined with small oddly colored chat boxes that may have exploded a few blood vessels in my left eye.

The questing variety was a tad bit on the low side, at least in the early levels. This seems to not be the case further into the game as my last couple of hours playing saw every odd questline from putting out a forest fire on a flying water sprinkler:

to shrinking and following a white rabbit to a mystical tea party:

At one point I was even bouncing on magical mushrooms to fly through the air as I scaled a waterfall. Try doing all that in one day elsewhere without suffering serious drug related side-effects!

Overall Experience: Excellent

I’ve had more fun gaming the past two nights than I’ve had in years. WildStar just captures so many elements of humor, fun, platforming, and combat that aren’t available in combination with each other anywhere else in the online sphere. And while I typically go for the dark and epic storylines, WildStar’s ‘srs bsns’ storyline is so riddled with satire towards the faction war that I can’t help but love the personality and races on both sides. WildStar will stand strong in the eyes of people who love to jump around, laugh at some lore notes, earn a gazillion achievements, shoot some cocky Chuas, and never accomplish the goal they signed on specifically to do. If that’s your idea of a good time, get yourself into beta and enjoy the ride.

Wildstar: New details revealed for 2015 - Posted on January 15, 2015Product Directo Mike Donatelli of Carbine Studios has just revealed new details for their Sci-Fi MMORPG, Wildstar. These details include new solo and group content, improvements to customization and more.

Wildstar: New Content Confirmed for 2015 - Posted on December 16, 2014Chad Moore, creative director for Wildstar, has just posted a letter to players detailing the focus and content of the game’s upcoming update. In addition to new player customization options, this update includes a variety of changes based on player feedback, bringing new quality of life improvements and enabling WildStar players to enjoy more of the game’s content, regardless of their level or playstyle preference.